With the advent of the Internet and electronic commerce, auction bidding methods and processes of resolving incoming bids to allocate available resources to the highest bidder have become varied and well known. The proliferation of computer-implemented auctions permits large numbers of individuals to participate in an auction process without gathering together at one physical location, or at any one particular time.
In addition, the computer-implementation of an auction allows individuals to continue to participate in the bidding process without the necessity of taking any action themselves. For example, an individual bidder may submit an initial bid for a particular offered good or service which may be less than the amount the bidder is actually willing to pay for the offered item. The bidder may at the same time activate an automatic bidding option, and indicate a maximum amount the bidder is willing to pay in the event that competing bids drive up the price of the offered item. By implementing an automatic bidding process such as this, the bidder need not continuously monitor the auction to determine when a higher bid must be submitted in order to stay in front of the competition.
Typical auction bidding methods accept each incoming bid, compare the bid against previously submitted bids, and assign a quantity of offered goods or services to the winning bids until the available quantities are exhausted. In the case in which the bidder's initial offer is lower than the maximum amount he or she is willing to pay for the offered item(s), an auto-bidding system is often implemented as described above. The auto-bidding feature is activated for each losing bid, adjusting the bid amount to an amount higher than the lowest winning bid (within the auto-bid's maximum which the bidder is willing to pay), and then re-resolving the bid list to again allocate the available quantities among the “new” list of winning bids. As this process is repeated for each successive losing bid in the bid list, the list may, depending on the number of bids, be resolved hundreds or thousands of times just to determine the actual winning bids based on the current list. When a new bid is then submitted, the process must repeat itself entirely, occupying valuable system resources.